% abstract for RuleML-2008 keynote talk
Hyper Logic Programs in SILK:
Redefining the KR Playing Field for Business and VLKB
Benjamin Grosof
Senior Research Program Manager, Knowledge Systems
Vulcan Inc.
We overview the approach taken by the SILK system, a new, highly
ambitious effort to redefine the knowledge representation (KR) playing
field for business rules and rule-based process management. The
newest part of Vulcan Inc.'s Project Halo, SILK aims to provide key
infrastructure for widely-authored VLKBs (Very Large Knowledge Bases)
for business and science that answer questions, proactively supply
information, and reason powerfully. SILK includes a highly
expressive, fully semantic, rule language based expressively on the
Hyper Logic Programs KR, together with components for reasoning, web
knowledge interchange, and collaborative knowledge acquisition.
Hyper LP newly synergizes several major strands of pure-research
progress in KR based on extensions of declarative logic programs,
which are the core KR of RuleML and Rule Interchange Format (RIF) as
well as of databases (SQL, XQuery, and SPARQL) and most commercial
implementations of OWL ontologies. Hyper LP adds: prioritized
defaults cf. courteous and Defeasible Logic; higher-order and frames
cf. F-Logic; tight integration of weakened full classical logic
(including OWL) cf. generalized Description LP; actions and events
cf. production rules, Event-Condition-Action rules, and
Situated/Production LP.
Key challenges for SILK include exploiting natural language in user
interaction, parallelism in reasoning, and disjunction in
expressiveness. We discuss prospects for the SILK approach to
effectively interchange and integrate a high percentage of the world's
structured knowledge starting from today's legacy forms. "SILK" stands
for "Semantic Inferencing on Large Knowledge", what the next
generation Web will be spun from.